Casual Meetings And Cohesion:

Building a Friendly Team Focused Organizational Culture

Firms that can cut loose and enjoy success together while remaining cohesive through hard times, tend to favor both teamwork and friendly competition. In being able to find the balance between these two ideals, the culture of advancement is constantly present in the organization and most employees consider themselves happy and fulfilled by their connection to the work.

This is why it is so important to do away with things like long and stuffy board room meetings in favor of more team orientated and innovation focused gatherings. Meeting and disseminating information will always be a top priority for any business. Choosing how to handle these gatherings can have a huge impact on the ability for teams to work together across departments without schisms and rifts developing as a result of imbalances in communicating the reality of competition in a team focused way.

With intentional planning around how you design your meetings, you can support the development of a friendly and cohesive organizational culture across your firm or collective. Just a few simple changes in the way you meet and interact with your staff can and will make all the differences in the world. Keep reading to learn more about how you can shape organizational culture with simple choices and tweaks on traditional business arrangements.

Celebrate Success and Offer Just Praise

Far too many work environments are mission focused 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Employees at all levels of the business feel immense stress and pressure coming from above and it is very rare for the clouds to break and the light of day to shine through bringing the team together to celebrate. In an environment like this, meetings are not exciting, fun or fulfilling times but rather times of dread and fear. No one looks forward to the blame game and there is a lot of passing of the buck. As tensions flare up during these heated moments, cohesion breaks down and teams begin to cannibalize each other to try to save face. This is not how you support a culture of innovation and collaboration.

To avoid this, make sure you are constantly letting your team know what they are doing right. When employees are constantly starving for validation and support from management, teams are not cohesive and collaboration does not flow easily. Build a thriving team by letting people know when they hit the mark. Make intentional effort to celebrate company milestones and positive news. These simple efforts to let your team know they are on track will help them to feel more loyal to you and your ongoing and evolving mission. Whenever you bring your team together, make it a point to highlight the good things you are accomplishing. Even if times are tough, lead with what is working and shift the focus to finding solutions rather than levying blame.

Casual Meetings and Cohesion

For many of the most innovative firms in the world, a main key to success is based on how they have been able to create a culture of cohesion across their teams. Everyone has drank the Kool-Aid so to speak and is really motivated to want to work together to achieve mutually beneficial goals. This really is the secret sauce and the true game changer between building a team that goes to work and one that is working towards a shared mission

Many firms find that by scheduling meetings around lunch time and bringing the team to gather in spaces away from the office can really help to boost transparency and increase innovation. These trips away from the normal space of work allow teams to socialize in a friendly and supportive way. By moving away from the pressure of graphs, charts and figures in board room session, your team can speak more freely and open up more easily. For many people, just combining the best part of the day “lunch” with what is for many the worst “meeting time” is a really simple way to get people more engaged.

Consider taking your staff out to beautiful natural areas and meeting in unusual and non traditional settings. These retreats and brainstorming sessions allow your team to come together in unique new ways. You can capitalize on these events by using pictures across social media channels and encouraging not only customers from your target markets but also your employees to engage with these. Even if you just schedule some time to get outside the office and take a walk around the block, your employees will appreciate the efforts and your organization will increasingly be viewed as one that cares about its staff.

When you create meetings and gatherings that your team looks forward to, everyone is more at ease. When this is matched with a culture of acknowledgement and praise around what they are doing right, you can be assured that everyone on staff will feel more willing to go the extra mile to secure victory in the future. When you can make the stress and competition of work into something fun and exciting, it makes everyone want to be a part of it.

Friendly Team Focus

Competition and teamwork are such important factors when it comes to generating innovation.It should be in every organization’s interest to want to build a friendly and cohesive team that works hard and plays together. When you can get everyone to feel that they are a part of something special, they are way less willing to want to sabotage you or your mission. Better yet, when given the opportunity to leave, they are unwilling to because they know they are fulfilled and connected to the organizational culture of your firm.

A friendly team orientated focus will allow your staff to build on past strengths and move through challenges with tenacity and vigor. Don’t look at your people as cogs of the machine, see them as friends and family, a part of your community. Don’t view meetings as something you have to do but instead as something your whole team looks forward. With just a few simple tweaks your staff will feel more inspired, fulfilled and connected to each other then ever before.

Jason Stone is widely known by celebrities and almost 2 million people around the world as @Millionaire_Mentor on Instagram. Stone has successfully launched multiple 6 and 7 figure Instagram and Internet platforms and is becoming a well known social media influencer and marketer.

Known for his e-commerce success in the automotive industry in his early years with Treadstone Performance Engineering, Inc., Jason is a mechanical engineer, real estate investor, car enthusiast, and startup investor. Jason has Co-founded the Impact Billions Movement and also created Gentlemen’s Mafia Instagram network which culminates relationships and success among the thousands of its members worldwide and utilizes his experience and passion as a motivator, mentor, teacher, and social media influencer to help others create success.